'The future doesn't fit into the containers of the past. Paid ... - NYLON.

INTERACTIVE
are you still not getting it?
‘The future doesn’t fit into the
containers of the past. Paid,
Owned and Earned are the new
channels of marketing.’
By Joah Santos

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 4
- Branding vs. direct response
- Whatbrandsarespendingoninteractivenow,andwhere
PLANNING 8
- Best Practice: Get a new funnel
- Inventory evaluation tools
- Best Practice: Evaluate clutter of all media partners
- Best Practice: Use reach-buying techniques for brand launches or repositionings
- Best Practice: Understand and use audience cumes to flight campaigns
- Best Practices in usage of ad networks and exchanges
MEASUREMENT 14
- Clicks: Brands embrace response
- Best Practice: Branding impact studies
- Best Practice: Measure branding impact
- Best Practice: Find an optimal online conversion path
- Best Practice: Measure offline-sales impact over time
- Best Practice: Use current GRP tools–support initiatives to create better ones
- Best Practice: Pre- and post-buy studies: Get what you paid for
- Best Practice: Test for optimal frequency
- Best Practice: Employ brand-protection tools for context safety
- Best Practice: Was the ad even seen? Above-the-fold tools
- Best Practice: Re-marketing consumers
- Best Practice: Incorporate interactive into media-mix models
CREATIVE 21
- Best Practices: Dynamic Logic, Nielsen IAG
- Best Practice: Don‖t optimize creative to the click
- New creative options
CONCLUSION 24
Finding the magic
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INTRODUCTION
CHART 1
Brand dollars vs. direct dollars
2009 U.S. MEASURED MEDIA SPEND 2009 U.S. ONLINE MEDIA SPEND
TOTAL: $147 billion
TOTAL: $24 billion
DIRECT
$55 billion
$91 billion
BRAND
BRAND
$6 billion
$18 billion
DIRECT
Source: Brand net analysis based on Barclays Capital, Think Equity Partners LLC, and
DMA
After 15 years of interactive, are you still not getting it?
Brand advertisers have seemingly been left out of this datadriven,
digital-media revolution. According to a Brand.net
analysis of data from Barclay Capital, Think Equity Partners and
the Direct Marketing Association, online accounts for
30% of the $55 billion spent on direct marketing, yet accounts
for only 6% of the $91 billion spent on branding in the U.S. in 2009
(see chart 1). The Interactive Advertising Bureau commissioned
Bain to survey 700 marketers in April 2010. When asked to look
forward to
2011, brand marketers expected that 70% of dollars would go
to print and TV, while direct-response marketers would spend
nearly an equal amount on online as on print and TV. When one
considers that all forms of digital media tend to reach younger
audiences than print and TV in a more highly engaged manner,
online has a lot of explaining to do. Millions of media dollars are
being left on the table. The reality is that marketers have a
serious challenge buying and planning interactive media. It‖s too
complicated, ignores basic precepts of marketing (including the
significance of creative and the value of context), and has for too
long set itself apart from other media.
It‖s a business-process problem that the entire ecosystem of
the business has to take control of.” The IAB, with the
Association of National Advertisers and American
Association of Advertising Agencies, issued an RFP to
consulting firms to create “a structure for change.”
Meanwhile, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board,
which includes members Coca-Cola Co., Publicis, Starcom and
the ANA, is striving “to create a set of met- rics generally
recognized as meaningful and predictive.” A third proj- ect
involves Google and the ARF issuing an RFP for a project to
make reach and frequency metrics comparable between
online and TV.
While the industry looks for answers, this report will address pitfalls
online faces as a branding medium and simplify, simplify,
simplify. Tools, techniques and creative options can make
interactive media sing for brand marketers—we just need to
adopt them.
That complexity prompted the IAB to act last month.
“Measurement is one of the key obstacles to growing spend in
inter- active,” said Sherrill Mane, IAB senior VP-industry services.
“Unless we create a smooth supply chain so that online can be
bought and sold as simply as TV, we will be held back...

CHART 2
All forms of TV viewing are increasing, but watching “linear” TV remains the dominant mode.
Watching TV in the home
NUMBER OF USERS 2+, Q1 2010
286 million
DIFFERENCE IN MONTHLY REACH
FROM Q1 2009
+0.6%
Using a Mobile Phone 229 million +18.1%
Using the Internet on a PC 191 million +17.3%
Watching Video on Internet 135 million +2.6%
Watching Timeshifted TV 96 million +5.3%
Mobile Subscribers Watching
Video on a Mobile Phone
20 million
0 100 200 300
+51.2%
Source: The Nielsen
Company
Branding vs. Direct Response
The w o r l d s of branding and direct response are the
Venus and Mars of the ad world—or are they? One is all
squishy and emotional, filled with beautiful sentiment t h at
goes straight to the heart. The other gets right to the
point: click, slam, bam, thank you, ma‖am—you‖ve just
lowered your car insurance or whitened your teeth.
Now, to clear up a few misconceptions about direct and
branding, and media channels:
TELEVISION DOES MORE THAN JUST BRANDING, AND BRANDING DOES LEAD TO SALES
Yes, those ads make people hum and feel good, but they also
sell product—though t h a t product is not sold directly
through the TV, in most cases. Brand marketers have some
50 years of experience buying TV, and they know precisely
how many gross rating points will result in sales of how
many rolls of toilet paper. How do they know this? Mediamix
modeling and scanner data. TV buys for package goods
are as much a data-driven business as online is.
TV USAGE AND EFFECTIVENESS ARE NOT DIMINISHING AS AUDIENCES GO ONLINE
Nielsen‖s Three Screen Report is an essential read for any
marketer. The data show that while television usage is
changing and includes more variables, TV likely will always be
the dominant medium in terms of consumer usage, and is
actually increasing in all forms (see chart 2). TV viewers,
however, are getting older: while the average person spends
more than 35 hours per week watching TV, people 65+ spend
more than 48 hours. In terms of effectiveness, TV is working
just as well. Marketers, however, are rightly concerned about
certain trends, especially increasing fragmentation of reach,
clutter and ad skipping. Yet, the pric es don‖t go down, and in this
year‖s Upfront alone, over $9 billion dollars of advertising was
purchased.
MOST INTERACTIVE MEDIA CAN HAVE A BRANDING IMPACT, BEYOND DIRECT RESPONSE
All interactive has some kind of a branding impact, and that
includes search. In the new world of media, brands get
created in more subtle ways. Branding e f f e c t s are
everywhere and more so than ever they can easily be taken out of
your complete control, unless you are watching all of the channels.

CHART 3
50%
40
30
Online ad spend data: Search has grown fastest; Display, Rich Media & Video also show positive trends. IAB
internet ad revenue share by major format, 2004 through 2009
HELP WANTED
Classifieds went from 18%
of total online ad spend in
2004 to 10% in 2009,
affecting total ad spend
20
10
0 SEARCH DISPLAY BANNERS CLASSIFIEDS RICH MEDIA LEAD GENERATION SPONSORSHIPS
Source: The Nielsen Co.
BRANDING ONLINE CAN MEAN ASKING FOR A CLICK
Marketers are taking advantage of the fact that you can
include a click through with online ads, but that may not be
their complete measure of performance, if they can get a
response, they will. Whole generations now are familiar
with the concept of interacting with brands and ads, and
marketers are taking advantage of that in ways that engage
and often entertain. The majority of brand creative we
sees is “brand response.” In the case of FMPG (CPG), it‖s
often a drive to a coupon or a game; for entertainment, a
drive to a microsite or trailer.
The whole notion of “branding” as some sort of
consumer/product connection/value system dictated by
marketers is not relevant in the age of ubiquitous media
and consumer control. Interactive media have blown up
the very notion of what a brand is, making it more
consumer-involved and dynamic. Brands can now be direct
sellers, content producers, bloggers, tweeters and even
friends without having to rely on media to deliver those
messages. Consumers can seek out those brands, connect
with them through social networks, tweet about them, and
instantaneously let all their friends know what they think
about them or what they plan to buy.
The very fact that we still talk about new and old media,
inter-active and traditional, goes to the heart of the
problem, says Joah Santos, chief strategy and innovation
officer at Nylon Group. Things have changed forever and
most of the agencies are still busy defending their own
territory.
TV IS BETTER THAN DIGITAL OR DIGITAL IS BETTER THAN TV ?
Advertising agencies are still producing creative publicity
and on other side digital agencies are saying that TV is
dying; the truth is that TV is stronger than ever. The game
has just become more evolved.
People around the world are in a post-digital age. People
don‖t stop and say, ―Now I‖m going to use analog media; now
I‖m going to use digital.‖ The future doesn‖t fit into the
containers of the past. Forget ATL/BTL and analog/digital!
Marketers today have three ways to connect to their
customers; Paid, Owned or Earned. Spending money in
advertising and promotion among other things is Paid
media. Their own physical assets from packaging to
storefronts or their own content/service assets such as
film, database and expertise is Owned media. Social
networks can listen and engage with what people are
saying and passing along about their brand is Earned
media.

CHART 4
Foods make top spenders list along with perennials like loan consolidation, auto and wireless.
Top brands ranked on share of estimated spending during first half 2010, U.S.
RANK BRAND PARENT COMPANY 1ST HALF 2010 YOY % CHANGE
SHARE OF ESTIMATED SPEND IN SHARE OF SPEND IN SHARE OF SPEND
1 LOWERMYBILLS.COM INC. Experian Group Ltd. 2.66% 235%
2 WYETH PHARMACEUTICALS Pfizer Inc. 1.32% 4,011%
3 CHEVROLET General Motors Corp. 0.98% 226%
4 AT&T WIRELESS SERVICES INC. AT&T Corp. 0.82% -44%
5 HILLSHIRE FARM Sara Lee Corp. 0.75% N/A
6 CLASSES USA INC. Experian Group Ltd. 0.71% 95%
7 TOYOTA Toyota Motor Corp. 0.67% 3%
8 LENDINGTREE.COM InterActiveCorp 0.58% 285%
9 FORD Ford Motor Co. 0.47% -56%
10 ORVILLE REDENBACHER ConAgra Foods Inc. 0.44% 1,890,271%
11 CHEETOS PepsiCo Inc. 0.39% 2,193%
12 CENTRUM Pfizer Inc. 0.38% 23,581%
13 NISSAN Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. 0.38% 91%
14 PET HEALTH & NUTRITION Procter & Gamble Co. 0.34% 3,760%
15 WIRELINE COMMUNICATIONS AT&T Corp. 0.31% -25%
Source: The Nielsen Co.
Old notions of TV as a bucket for branding dollars, online as
the receptacle for direct. In the current times, people are
marketing to themselves. What‖s the solution? Plan across
media; deliver engagement, measure across, never use the
word digital.
All evidence suggests that these three media types need to
be connected and leveraged together. How companies
organize, partner and measure across this platform will be a
key development from 2011 onwards.
What and where brands are spending on
interactive now
When we talk about brand-related advertising online, we
typically are referring to visual ads such as display, rich
media and video rather than search. Search, the ultimate
“bottom funnel” activity has continued to grow even during
the recession, as other forms of interactive advertising took
a nosedive. Online classifieds were hardest hit (see chart 3),
as data indicates. Display was stable, while rich media and
video showed slight increases. Given the fact that display,
rich media and video account for a smaller share than
search, it‖s interesting how much entrepreneurial activity is
focused on image-based ads. An entirely n e w sector has
developed over the past three years in the automation of
image- based online advertising: we now have Demand
Side Platforms, Supply Side Platforms, Ad Exchanges, Data
Optimizers and cloud- computing companies focused on
simplifying the process and increasing the effectiveness of
interactive advertising. Google is so bullish on display it took
the unusual step of launching an ad campaign, including a
Times Square billboard, to promote the value of its display
network. When the house that search built starts talking up
the power of display, and a whole lot of venture capitalists
jump in to support automation of interactive display, it‖s clear
the market sees untapped potential. Given that so many of
these companies are data-driven, you might assume that
interactive is becoming even more direct response-driven.
Are brands embracing this hyped-up advertising world?
Nielsen‖s Ad Relevance impression numbers reflect only
CPM buys, and while Q1 2010 was flat versus the previous
year, Q2 was up 7%. Nielsen‖s online ad-impression data by
category shows that heavy “brand categories” are indeed
buying into online. Financial services remain the top category,
though the decline of financial ads online lead to stories of the
“death of the banner” throughout 2008 and 2009. The top
growth categories are retail (up 25%), consumer goods (up 41%)
and public services (up 71%). Automotive is stable, up

CHART 5 Social networks are the big growth story, but Yahoo still carries nearly double the volume. Top sites ranked by impressions during 2Q 2010, U.S.
Yahoo
Facebook
MSN
MySpace
The Weather Channel
Comcast.net
AOL.com
FOXNEWS.COM
CNBC
YouTube
Juno
MSNBC
CNN
ESPN.com
Google
Verizon Online
Pogo
IMDb
Realtor.com
Road Runner
NeoPets
FOX Sports on MSN
MyYearBook.com
Zillow.com
Charter.net
2Q10 IMPRESSIONS (IN BILLIONS)
11.83
10.90
10.21
8.80
6.72
6.71
6.20
5.86
4.70
4.36
3.90
3.47
2.86
2.60
2.50
2.45
2.10
1.76
1.67
1.58
1.49
39.31
57.65
80.75
+16%
TOP GAINERS
YOY % change
for Yahoo
MyYearBook.com 146%
Facebook 119%
MSN 70%
Zillow.com 66%
Juno 40%
MySpace 24%
The Weather Channel 32%
NeoPets 31%
YouTube 30%
MSNBC 30%
Road Runner 23%
Verizon Online 18%
Pogo 16%
Realtor.com 15%
Fox Sports on MSN 9%
CNBC 9%
TOP LOSERS
156.92
FoxNews.com -46%
AOL.com -37%
IMDb -34%
NeoPets -31%
MSNBC -30%
ESPN.com -23%
Comcast.net -10%
CNN -7%
Google
N/A
0 50 100 150 200
Source: The Nielsen Co.
6%. Interestingly, the telecommunications sector, one of the
heaviest spenders during the recession, declined by 35%. Telco
numbers as a percent of total have decreased due to other
types of marketers coming back into interactive. It also reflects
the fact that cell phones are employing a lot of directresponse
strategies online as conversions are the primary goal.
The top 15 spenders list for online advertisers is always an
interesting mishmash. In the early ‖00s, the list was
dominated by the dot-coms. Coming out of the last
recession (2002-‖03), Fortune 500 companies had begun to
make the list. In the second quarter of 2010, Hillshire Farms,
Orville Redenbacher, Cheerios a n d Centrum a p p e a r .
Clearly, brand market ers a r e embracing interactive as a
marketing medium.
The rest of the list also has positive stories for branding
(auto brands, for example, make up seven of the top 25). Who
are the Pets.com of yore? LowerMyBills.com and Lending Tree are
perennials of the top 10. Where are the dollars going? Clearly,
brand marketers continue looking for reach, but there are new
ways for them to get that reach: namely, social networks. Among
the top sites ranked by display-ad impressions, the biggest gainers
have been social-media sites (see chart 6). It should be noted that
this Nielsen data is blind to the cost of those impressions. A report
from comScore in June 2010 showed that social media cost-perthousand
rates (CPMs) were so low the overall average CPM
came down considerably.

PLANNING
“Brand media planning has changed so much. It used to be
about reach and relevancy; now it‖s about reach and
relevancy in a world of consumer control that is becoming
more social and more mobile layered on with shoppermarketing
practices.”
-PERIANNE GRIGNON, FORMER CMO OF SEARS AND CURRENT VP-MEDIA STRATEGY
AND CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER AT [X+1]
“Online suffers because it‖s the Swiss Army Knife of media. It‖s got
a toothpick, a magnifying glass and a knife. It can work in so many
places.”
- REX BRIGGS, CEO OF MARKETING EVOLUTION
Briggs‖ observation about the multifaceted nature of online
brings into focus another long-held marketing precept, the
notion of a linear purchase funnel and its use in the planning
process. If we con- sider how consumers made purchase deci
sions 40 years ago—when typically, they
watched one of three TV networks, read a
daily newspaper in print (one which supplied
coupons in the Thursday food section and
Sunday inserts) and listened to local radio
stations on their way to work each
morning—it was all pretty simple. Each
medium had its
strengths (TV for branding/reach, print for branding and
information/product consideration, newspapers and radio
for local and pro- motions). The yellow pages came in at the
bottom, as consumers looked up where to buy products.
Over the past 15 years, online has pummeled that funnel,
leaving it hopelessly leaking and generally useless. Various
forms of interactive can work at different levels of the funnel.
The 79% of consumers who use the internet (Pew, August
2010) rarely purchase a “considered” product like a car without
getting more information online first. A significant number of
purchases in categories like travel and electronics have shifted to
online. Younger and more male-skewing audiences tend to
become aware of entertainment and even personal-care
products online. Search has replaced yellow pages—and mobile
search has made it available on the go, while consumers are
already actively shopping. Promotionally sensitive consumers
are not only clipping but also clicking their way to coupons.
So what‖s a media planner to do, seeing that hard-and-fast rules
about which media work best for awareness, consideration and
purchase decisions no longer exist?
BEST PRACTICE: GET A NEW FUNNEL—AND START
UNDERSTANDING MORE ABOUT PEOPLE AND THEIR
PURCHASE PROCESS ON A CATEGORY AND EVEN PER-
has impact? Yaakov Kimelfeld, senior VP-digital research and
analytics director at MediaVest, believes that in today‖s media
world, the purchase path is more complex and ever-changing
than Briggs‖ four funnels could ever accommodate. The group
he runs at MediaVest conducts weekly surveys of a panel of
consumers, which helps develop media-path analysis on a per
product basis. Media consumption is changing so rapidly and
radically that this kind of ongoing check-in with consumers
yields valuable insights, Kimelfeld said.
For an industry futurist like Rishad Tobaccowala, who advocates
blowing up the funnel and changing how agencies operate
(“There are too many that just are production houses for :30s—
they should just go away”), media planning needs to start with
going back to the human being. “The single most important thing
we need to keep in
‘The future doesn’t fit into the containers of the past. So
the old terms of Above the Line/ Below the Line or
Analog/Digital are no longer relevant. Paid, Owned and
Earned are the new channels of marketing.’- Joah
Santos, Chief Strategy and innovation officer, Nylon
BRAND BASIS
Rex Briggs understands the appeal of simple diagrams for
explaining concepts like how people come to make a purchase.
To him, the funnel should be broken into four types based
on the life cycle of the product and goals like
acquisition/trial, brand building, maintenance and
conversion/retention.
Do we need even more finite funnels showing where interactive
mind is that we are marketing to people, not consumers or
customers,” he explained.
In the today‖s world, discovering the distinct, changing path to
purchase, and isolating people who have displayed intent, is
certainly a best practice.
Perhaps no job in the online world is more thankless than the
role of the online planner. Thousands of sites, so little time, so
much less money.
Interactive is not so different from the quality measures that are
applied to print. Considerations should include the quality of
the placement, using parameters such as clutter, ad size, position
on page time spent on page and repeat visitation patterns of
the site.

INVENTORY-EVALUATION TOOLS
Some shortcuts can help evaluate online inventory for quality.
ONLINE PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION SITES Members have to fulfill various
qualifications, including a professional staff that edits content. Still, the
OPA does not employ any sort of “Good Content” seal, and parent
companies, not individual sites, are listed as members, so no complete
list of OPA sites is available.
COMSCORE 100, 250 OR 500
comScore‖s ad-planning tool allows users to limit searches to only
top sites by reach and allows filtering by types of content such as
adult, social, user-generated, etc.
URL WHITELISTS
Adnetik keeps massive lists of sites carrying advertising, and
excludes ones with reported placement and ad-load time
problems.
GOOGLE AD PLANNER
This free ad-planning tool (www.google.com/adplanner) is accessible
to anyone. Top 1,000 properties are ranked by unique users, which
doesn‖t automatically denote quality but is an easy way to filter out
properties too small for an advertiser‖s needs.
NIELSEN
As of March, @plan was integrated into the media-planning tool.
Claritas Prizm Clusters are also now integrated, so planners can rank
properties by reach within chosen groups.
CHART 7 Portal channels more likely to lead to search; Media sites
impact purchases
20%
15
10
5
0 OPA (A) BRAND SEARCHES
Portal Channels (B)
PURCHASES
Social Media (C)
BASE Site Ratings (N=6222: 4185 OPA, 1544 Portal Channels, 493 Social Media). Q: Which of the following have you
ever done as the result of seeing an ad on [SITE]. Searched for more information about the product or service, made a
purchase? Superscripted capital letters (ABC) indicate statistically significant differences at 90% confidence between
site categories.
Source: Online Publishers Association
CHART 8 News sites are most cluttered.
comScore‖s Publisher Ad Clutter Summary report
News/Information
Sports
Conversational Media
Portals
Community
DISPLAY ADS PER TOTAL PAGES
0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0
Source: comScore, June 2010
Does context truly matter? It‖s been a battle that
premium publishers have fought since internet upstarts
began flooding the ad world with inventory. While someone
like David Payne, founder of Short Tail Media (a short-lived,
brand-focused ad net- work built on inventory from Online
Publishers Association members), felt he was spending too
much time trying to push the value of context on agencies,
the majority of those interviewed for this report were
strong proponents of context.
Even those most associated with the data/direct-response
perspective are coming around. Nathan Woodman, managing
director-COO, Adnetik, an ad trading desk, noted based on its
data analysis, “We are starting to see that people that visit
premium sites have different behaviors to nonpremium.”
He also believes that a finite amount of quality
inventory is available out there.
The OPA attempted to get at this elusive halo effect in its study
“A Sense of Place,” conducted by Harris and released in June
2010. Consumers related their positive associations with a
media brand to the advertisers on the site, expecting a certain
level of quality from those advertisers. Consumers displayed the
most loyalty to “branded” sites, and while portals were most
likely to drive search activity, branded sites were most likely to
drive purchases. Social media appears to be a different media
beast altogether (see chart 7).
BEST PRAC T I C E : EVALUATE C LU T T E R OF ALL M E D I A PA RT N E R S
Clutter has long been a challenge of online advertising. The
more ads per page, the more they are ignored. (One
exception to that are sites that are used for comparative
shopping, especially for auto. Despite research from
Nielsen, Dynamic Logic and Insight Express indicating that
fewer ads were more effective, in these tough times, some
publishers have increased ad loads. Which category most has
to get a handle on the program? News (see chart 8).

Brand marketers s h ou l d always ask publishers what the ad
load is on their web pages, in addition to ascertaining
placement on the page. comScore now has a report available
in AdMetrix called the Publisher Ad Clutter Summary report,
which offers data on Average Display Ads Per Total Pages,
Average Display Ads Per Visit, and more.
BEST PRACTICE: USE REACH-BUYING TECHNIQUES
FOR BRAND LAUNCHES OR REPOSITIONING
For the past decade, various sites have tried to create
splashy units and inventory packages to help brand marketers
support launches or achieve quick reach. Here are some successful
techniques.
■ Homepage takeovers
First launched on Yahoo nearly 10 years ago, homepage
takeovers of major sites like CNN, ESPN, The New York Times
and The Wall Street Journal are the rough equivalent of running
full page, back-of-a-section ad in a major newspaper. All of these
sites offer the opportunity to surround content with
sequenced banners or roadblocks, or to offer exclusive use of
homepages.
■ Google Display Network blasts
These can also reach a large audience in a short time period
(usually 24-76 hours). With a signature property like
YouTube, these blasts are the equivalent of prime-time
sponsorships of network TV programs. What kind of reach can
they achieve? The Infiniti March Madness Blast delivered 79
million ad impressions in four days, for example. The YouTube
homepage placement alone delivered 40 million views per day.
■ Yahoo Log-In Page Units
Introduced this summer, this mega-rich-media ad unit is
placed on the third most-highly trafficked page on Yahoo.
About 26 million unique users in the U.S. each day visit the
log-in page that connects Yahoo subscribers with their e-mail
accounts, stock pages and other services. Chevrolet ran a
campaign in June 2010 with four different executions that had
users click on a link placed within the background art that takes
them to a page with more information on the Chevrolet
model displayed.
BEST PRACTICE: UNDERSTAND AND
USE AUDIENCE CUMES TO FLIGHT
CAMPAIGNS APPROPRIATELY
Planners typically buy sites based on potential reach. There‖s
a simple fallacy to that logic: You would have to buy every
impression.
chart 9: one-day takeover of Yahoo‖s homepage
CHART 9
120%
100
80
60
40
20
0
Understanding how a site cumes its audience can help in the
flighting of campaigns
REACH OF UNIQUES
DAY 2, 40%
Yahoo and Facebook cume their
audiences at similar rates
CARS.COM ESPN
FACEBOOK.COM
NEW YORK TIMES
DIGITAL
STYLE.COM
YAHOO SITE
1 BIG AD,
4 CARS
Chevrolet
featured
four models
in this Yahoo
rich media
unit
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31
DAY IN THE
MONTH Source: comScore, May 2010

BEST PRACTICE: USE AUDIENCE TARGETING TO
EXTEND REACH BEYOND CONTEXT OR TO INCREASE
THE EFFICIENCY OF A BUY
Behavioral targeting in 2001, was seen as a way to juice
response rates (clicks). It was largely the domain of directresponse
advertisers or brand marketers who were driving
online conversions and buying on a DR basis. It‖s now had its
own rebranding and emerged as “audience targeting.”
While audience targeting is still used heavily by DR
advertisers, marketers are using it even when they are not
looking to drive a specific transaction. It represents 30% of
customers, an increase from 2009. The technique is a
crucial bridge to TV buying, where the aim is to deliver a
message to a sizable audience. It‖s as close as we are going to
get to a GRP (gross rating point).
It is an answer to an efficiency problem. B rand clients are
paying too much when they buy context directly from
publishers—soap doesn‖t need context. We need to make
online a more efficient buy. The shift toward audience
buying makes sense beyond just cost. It‖s intent rather
than segment-based marketing, and uses the unique
targeting capabilities of online.
So who buys audience targeting and how finite does it get?
An analysis of top targets bought on the Audience Science
platform over the past year shows that it is a mix of very
specific targeting, intent marketing and reach aggregation.
CHART 10 Top Audience Segments purchased: June 2010
RANK
AUDIENCE SEGMENT
1 AUTO > AUTO SHOPPERS
2 LIFESTYLE > OUTDOOR ENTHUSIAST
3 LIFESTYLE > ECO-AWARE INDIVIDUALS
4 TECHNOLOGY > CELL PHONE ENTHUSIASTS
5 LIFESTYLE > PROUD PARENTS
6 CUSTOM >
7 AUTO > ASIAN IMPORT BUYERS
8 AUTO > LUXURY AUTOMOBILE BUYERS
9 TRAVEL > VACATION TRAVELERS
10 AUTO > AUTO ENTHUSIASTS
SEASONAL
OUTDOOR ENTHUSIASTS,
VACATION TRAVELERS
HOT EVERY MONTH
AUTO (4), CELL PHONE
ENTHUSIASTS
CUSTOM
1 OF THE TOP 10
Source: Audience Science Quarterly Report, June, 2010
In a given month, one to three of the top slots typically go to
custom audience segments; there are a few broad targets
marketers would recognize from TV (women 25-54, men
18-34). Automotive clearly is using the technique to find
market buyers at more affordable prices than those on
auto sites and in auto context. It appears in the top 10
categories every month. Other top targets are “gadget
heads” and “cell phone enthusiasts.” For telco, it‖s a matter of
reach plus intent. (See chart 10 for the top targets purchased
from Audience Science in June 2010.)
CHART 11
Consumers are spending more time on social networks, less time on portals.
30% SHARE OF GLOBAL TOTAL MINUTES SPENT ONLINE FACEBOOK YAHOO YOUTUBE GOOGLE MSN
20 4
4 6
5 5 5
7 7
7
7
8 8 8
7
7
6 6 6 6
6 6
5
5
5 5 5
10
4
5
4 4 4 4
4 4 4
4
5 5 5
4
4 4 4 4 4
4 4 4
4 4 4 4
1
0 June
2009
1 1 1 1 1
July
1 1 1
August September October November December January
2010
1 1 1 1
February March April May June
Audience: Persons age 15+. Worldwide, home/work/university locations. Source: comScore Media Metrix

BEST PRACTICES IN USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA: REACH OR
CONVERSATION?
Anyone looking at the user-growth curve of Facebook must stand
in awe before this latest player in the reach market (see chart 11).
Over the past year, the site morphed from a utility for twentysomethings
into a mass-market destination that reaches
42% of the online population. There are a whole lot of people
out there posting status updates, but is advertising on social
networks the best possible use of this type of communication?
The OPA study on the significance of various types of
content for advertising shows that ads on social networks are
not as effective at driving product sales or even brand searches
as other types of content. Perhaps the environment for socialmedia
ads is akin to e-mail: so personal and engrossing those
ads are not particularly noticed. To be sure, more research on
the topic is needed.
So, if the inventory is not as great in value as content, what is
it good for? Nielsen, which has developed a product in
conjunction with Facebook, called Facebook Brand Lift, points
out in its report “Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the
Value of a Social Media Impression”
that ads on Facebook are better served to generate brand
conversations (see chart 12). The basic point is that the same
creative used to push a message elsewhere may not work as
well in a social environment. “Brand Advocacy”, ads designed
to drive conversation about a brand, are a better way to go.
BEST PRACTICES IN USAGE OF AD
NETWORKS AND EXCHANGES:
PROCEED WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
Networks play a vital role in the online ecosystem to be able to
track and distribute online media and then built an ad
network to sell it. Networks get 30% to 50% gross margins
on the media; agencies could never charge that. Should the
clients accept it?” Networks can be a powerful part of
simplifying the process of buying interactive ads and achieving
the reach demanded by brand- oriented buys. Chart 13 shows
networks as ranked by comScore. But with more than 300
networks and little differentiation between them, not to
mention the increasing automation of sales through exchanges
and DSPs, how many networks can the market support? Those
interviewed expressed varying levels of skepticism about the
future of networks. Those that will thrive will likely have a
vertical specialty, strong content and solid agency relationships.
NBC Universal‖s decided to create its own ad network. In doing so,
the media company joined Time Inc., Forbes, Martha Stewart
Omnimedia and others in pooling company inventory to provide
reach of quality audiences. Another key survival tactic? The ability
to deliver rich-media units that cannot be bought on exchanges
and delivering them at scale.
CHART 12
Nielsen study shows that custom ads on Facebook designed to elicit
“brand friends” work better than traditional ads
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONTROL GROUP AND EXPOSED
20%
HOMEPAGE AD EXPOSURE
HOMEPAGE AD
SOCIAL ADVOCACY
10
0 Ad Recall Awareness
Purchase Intent
Source: Nielsen BrandLift
HOW TO EVALUATE AN AD NETWORK FOR BRANDING
USE
Here are key questions one should use to evaluate ad networks.
■ Buying Practices
How does the network secure its ad inventory? Does it buy from
other networks? Ad exchanges? Direct from publishers? Is there
any exclusivity of inventory? Buyers should be specific about the
kinds of inventory they want. One media buyer of pharma ads
makes networks sign a document specifying inventory will not
be purchased on exchanges, then monitors for accuracy.
■ Quality control
Does the network guarantee above the fold ads? That all
international impressions will be excluded? That there is no
“parked” inventory or social inventory you choose to exclude?
Unless international users are your target, specify countrytraffic
only in insertion orders. Parked sites is inventory that
often flows through networks especially ones bought on a CPA
basis.
How is the content in the network assessed? A common practice
is to use top sites in comScore as a proxy for quality though that
reflects reach more than quality. Due to contracts, most highly
valued publishers blind the inventory. How do networks back up
any claims to the quality of sites that make up their inventory?
One of the most dangerous challenges of inventory that comes
through networks especially ad exchanges which have
entirely automated the buying process and where no physical
contact occurs with the purchaser of the inventory is malware.

CHART 13 Ad network reach, June 2009 vs. June 2010
Yahoo Network
TOTAL UNIQUE VISITORS (000)
AOL Advertising
Google Ad Network
ValueClick Networks
24/7 Real Media
Microsoft Media Network U.S.
Specific Media
Turn Inc.
BIG 3
Yahoo,
Google and
AOL run the
top networks
for reach
AdBrite
FOX Audience Network
Collective Network
Tribal Fusion
Traffic Marketplace
AudienceScience
interCLICK
JUNE 2009
JUNE 2010
0 50,000 100,000 150,000 200,000
Source: Comscore
Malware can do something as simple as use an ad to infect a
computer with a virus or, in the worst case, scrape identities
like credit card data from a user‖s computer. Chart 14 shows
some incidents of malware that hit various sites this summer,
as captured by ClickFacts.
■ Brand Protection
Will the network guarantee ads will not run on undesirable sites
and issue a make good should that happen? Will it issue site lists and
let you determine which sites to avoid? Does it use a verification tool
like AdSafe or DoubleVerify? If the network uses its own tools, how
does it prove appropriate placements? A network like Undertone
will give a money-back guarantee (though CEO reports the
company has never had anyone ask for one). Does the network
have some vertical specialty? Contextual content in areas like health
can be valuable, even though placements aren‖t on top sites. Buying
a vertical network can help lower CPMs and still provide relevant
context.
Can the network offer scale of rich-media opportunities? Rich
media is great, but often a marketer doesn‖t just want to make a
splash on only one or two sites. What is a network‖s technological
capability? Which ad server does it use, and how proficient is the
network at using it? Most importantly, do trafficking people
understand the goals of the campaign and use the tools to optimize
accordingly and not just default to the direct-response metrics
they know?
■ Data usage
Does the network work with third-party resources to enrich data
and improve targeting? Are all of these providers Network-
Advertising-Initiative compliant? How‖s the back office? Are the
billing systems in order? Will the network work quickly to eliminate
discrepancies and reconcile billing with delivery? What are the
net- work‖s client services like? Despite the advent of Wall Street-like
trading systems, advertising remains a people business and many
agencies choose ad networks based on trust and sales-rep
relationships.
Do campaigns deliver against goals? If the agency does a prepost
buy test, how high was the accuracy in delivering on key
performance initiatives? According to Joah Santos, the old
direct- response adage “Test and Learn” applies here. If a
network doesn‖t deliver, drop it.

CHART 14
Snapshots of worst malware found in July through
August 2010 for ClickFacts clients
CLICKS: BRANDS EMBRACE RESPONSE
“Only 16% of consumers clicked on at least one display ad in March
2009, down from 32% two years earlier.”
–“HOW ONLINE ADVERTISING WORKS: WHITHER THE CLICK,” COMSCORE, 2009
DATE:
ACCOUNT:
MALWARE FOUND:
BEHAVIOR:
8-31-10 (Hit 30 different Ad Tags)
A Top 20 Publisher
PDF Exploit
The ad tag makes a request directly to a URL. The URL
returns Javascript code that contains a link to the
malware host site, krxxc.com. The intention is to steal
identities.
“The click should have been DOA.”
–RICHY GLASSBERG, COO OF MEDHELP.ORG AND ONE OF THE FOUNDERS OF THE IAB
“So many agencies plan on clicks. That‖s criminal.”
–JON GIBS, SENIOR VP-ANALYTICS AND INSIGHT, NIELSEN ONLINE
“The click is a crutch. Agencies are getting it; clients are not.”
–MICHAEL CASSIDY, CEO, UNDERTONE NETWORKS
“64% of advertisers are measuring with clicks.”
–COLLECTIVE MEDIA, 2010 DISPLAY ADVERTISING STUDY
“The overall click-through rate for static ads is 0.1%, for Flash ads, .09%,
consistent with 2008.” – DOUBLECLICK, 2009 YEAR IN REVIEW BENCHMARKS, RELEASED JUNE 2010
“If you get the consumer to the point of engagement, it‖s a lost opportunity if
you don‖t ask for the interaction.”
–STACEY DEZIEL, MANAGING PARTNER-ACCOUNT DIRECTOR, MEC
To measure by click, or not to measure by click? It‖s a question
that the industry has lived and nearly died by. There‖s nothing
wrong with soliciting an action to media, but it‖s not a sufficient
way to pay content providers. Research found that few people
are clickers and the percentage of those who do click is in
decline. Just 16% of online users regularly click on ads.
Perhaps the most disturbing finding of marketers was that the
majority were measuring a campaign‖s results by clicks. A paltry
35% said they used some sort of brand measure.
Can a click ever be a useful measure for a brand marketer? I t
can be one factor in deciding the success of a campaign. Clicks as
an action within a rich-media engagement have value because
the person who clicks has demonstrated true intent.
Despite a terrible reputation, clicks are not going away, and
probably never will in a medium with so much inventory and so
many publishers willing to sell it that way. Many are also using
“blended CPMs,” buys based on a cost-per-thousand rate so
that the ads can achieve desired reach but with a cost-per-click
(CPC) rate for guaranteed delivery of interested consumers.
For benchmarks on click performance by type of ad, including
impact of sizes and rich media, see DoubleClick‖s recently
released “2009 Year in Review Benchmarks.” While direct
response-focused, the report does make the point that people
are interacting with ads, and that larger ads and rich media tend
to elicit higher click rates.
DATE: 7-27-10; 7-23-10
ACCOUNT:
Fortune 100 Insurance Company
MALWARE FOUND:
BEHAVIOR:
PDF Exploit
Downloads a PDF that launches an executable file
that hits the registry. The intention is to steal
identities.
DATE: 7-13-10
ACCOUNT:
Fortune 100 Car Company
MALWARE FOUND: PDF Exploit
BEHAVIOR:
Downloads a PDF that launches a malicious
process. The intention is to steal identities.
DATE:
ACCOUNT:
MALWARE FOUND:
BEHAVIOR:
BEST PRACTICE: BRANDING IMPACT STUDIES
Weekly
Seen across multiple accounts
Registry updates for Flash & Quicktime
A site hits the registry and then asks to upgrade
Flash and/or Quicktime. While not always malicious,
this is a potential vector for infection.
Source: ClickFacts
In early 2010, the IAB and Bain released a study that diagnosed
the problem of why brand marketers were not focusing on
interactive as much as the IAB thought they should. A group of
700 marketers were asked which metrics they wanted for
online campaigns and which metrics they were able to get (see
chart 15). Something very strange is going on. The top metrics
marketers seek (message recall, ad favorability and purchase
intent) are the very metrics that are now being cooked into the
majority of larger branding buys. Are marketers just not getting
it? The more sophisticated in the field, those such as data
modelers Michele Madansky and Yaakov Kimmelfeld, have
moved beyond that set of metrics.
But for marketers relatively new to interactive, that data
reassures that the medium works. “It‖s in the agency‖s best interest
to do them to justify reallocation towards digital,” said Lynn Bolger,
exec VP-ad solutions at comScore. “They are also helpful when

there is no direct connection to offline sales, as in the case of
consumer package goods [CPG], where through-panel-matches
online data can be connected to offline.” Clearly, demand for
this type of survey has grown because there are so many
companies in the space. Dynamic Logic pioneered the
technique of pop-up surveys to an exposed versus a control
group to determine the lift generated by the campaign.
Dynamic Logic is now part of TNS Kantar Group and has a
normative database so that marketers can compare their
performance to those within specific ad categories and
norms over time. Dynamic Logic has carried out more than
5,700 studies and tested 190,000 creative campaigns over
the past 10 years. Insight Express emerged in 1999 as the first
alternative. It has conducted more than 1,500 studies of
50,000 creative campaigns. Nielsen and comScore also
perform the services now. Nielsen has two versions: one for
use on display advertising, and another for determining
whether an ad is eliciting conversations on Facebook. Vizu, a
Silicon Valley startup that initially focused on online polling
and social network activity, now offers a product calledAd
Catalyst. Crowd Science,a two-year-old research company
run by former executives from comScore and Nielsen, does
pre- and post-surveys within their Campaign Audience
Profiling Tool. The newest entry into the market is Dimestore,
from Knowledge Networks, which specializes in the
placement of campaign-measurement surveys
Whatdomarketersneedtoknow?„Itallcomesbackto
yougetwhatyoupayfor.‟Bewaryofthecheapsolution
thatyieldsquickandpositivedatabutlittletrueinsight.
in online video streams. Their surveys do not interrupt the
video experience or require respondents to go to a thirdparty
site, and the results are available in near real time.
What does a branding-impact survey cost? Pricing for adeffectiveness
research is typically categorized by service
level, and level of design/methodological rig o r .” For do-ityourself
offerings, which is often a single question, pricing
ranges from $5,000 to $9,000. Full-service research typically
includes: project management, survey design/build, dedicated
analyst/project management, media/publisher coord., data
weighting, written report and presentation. Pricing within
the full-service segment ranges from $20,000 to $25,000.
Brand-impact surveys are such a crowded space that they have
incited the most recent IAB research initiative, which focuses
on best practices in developing the control groups. The IAB
press release generated a storm of inside-baseball
discussion in the online-research community. What do
marketers need to know? As one poster on the Research Wonks
listserve noted: “It all comes back to, you get what you pay for.”
Be wary of the cheap solution that yields quick and positive data
but little true insight.
BEST PRACTICE: GO A STEP FURTHER AND MEASURE
BRANDING IMPACT ACROSS MEDIA
Media do not exist in isolation, and if the silos of “traditional” and
“interactive” are ever to break down, studies will need to
look at results across all media types. Dynamic Logic now
performs cross-media studies that can show relative contribution
of the big three (TV, print and online), as well as incorporate
mobile, gaming and social media to standard brand-impact
measures. Dynamic Logic has conducted over 350 of these over
the past 10 years (see chart 16).
Clients are using them as a complement to media-mix
modeling. This type of study works well when no sufficient
historical data on certain media are available or there is
relatively low reach for some media on the plan compared to
others. Consumer package goods companies are the biggest
users of this type of research, but last year saw a big uptick
in usage by financial-services companies. Studies like this
cost anywhere from $60,000 to $250,000.
TV, online and print together are very strong at building
top-of-mind, unaided brand awareness and communicating
key brand messages (see chart 17). When used in
combination, these media show three times the increase of
TV alone.
Rex Briggs—who, along with the IAB and the ARF, brought
XMOS, or cross-media optimization studies, to the online
world between 2001 and 2006—built a consultancy based on
this type of study, and counts among his
clients Honda, Acura, MTV Networks and
the agency RPA. He now has enough
data from his Return on Marketing
Objectives Studies (ROMO) that he has
built out a normative database and a
dashboard tool that will optimize media
spending not on gross ratings points (GRPs) but on impact.
Eight categories of data are represented, including CPG,
auto and financial services.
BEST PRACTICE: MEASURE IMPACT
OVER TIME AND DETERMINE WHAT IS
THE OPTIMAL ONLINE CONVERSION
PATH
The challenge with brand-impact studies that include some
sort of “intent” metric is that what people say they will do
does not exactly correlate to their actual activity. But
interactive excels at providing data on what people do online
after exposure to an ad whether or not they click. Action
over time post-exposure without a click is called “view
through” and has been a standard online metric available
through third-party ad servers for over a decade.
DoubleClick conducted two waves of research in the mid-
‖00s that showed which percentage of these “viewthroughs”
could be directly attributed to the online
exposure; these studies showed attribution figures around
65%. It‖s all a matter of setting up the campaign
appropriately a n d setting an appropriate window to
track those conversions. Microsoft research has shown that,
the window of tracking a view-through was too short.
Research found that activity continues at least one month postexposure
(see chart 18).

CHART 15 700 marketers were asked which metrics they wanted for online campaigns, and which metrics they were able to get.
PERCENT OF RESPONDENTS
60 WHAT BRAND MARKETERS WANT WHAT BRAND MARKETERS GET
#3
#2
30
#1
0 Brand
awareness
Likelihood to
recommend
Conversion
rates
Click
through
Message
association
Time spent
on page
View
through
Source: Bain/IAB 2009 Marketer Survey
CHART 16
All brand-impact studies operate on similar measurement principles.
AWARENESS
Brand awareness (measures the level of familiarity respondents have with the brand (aided and unaided)
ONLINE AD AWARENESS
Measures whether or not respondents recall an advertisement for a brand, product or service
MESSAGE ASSOCIATION
Measures the extent to which respondents can match the messages
and/or concepts in the creative to the brand
Awareness
BRAND FAVORABILITY
Measures the extent to which respondents have a
positive or favorable opinion of the brand
PURCHASE INTENT
Measures the likelihood of
respondents to purchase
the brand
in the future
Persuasion
Source: Dynamic Logic

CHART 17 TV, print and online work best together to build awareness.
UNAIDED BRAND AWARENESS
30
25
7.5 LIFT
over base
visitation. comScore Action Lift also measures the impact of
digital advertising, as does Nielsen‖s Direct Effect Analysis.
BASE DELTA BEST PRACTICE: MEASURE OFFLINE SALES IMPACT
OVER TIME
TV versus no TV show an average sales lift of 7% to 9% over the
course of a year. When we‖ve conducted similar studies with
comScore tools mapped back to scanner data, we see lift of 9% over
the course of three months. Because targeting is more precise
online than on TV, online can deliver the lift faster.”
–GIAN FULGONI, CO-FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN OF COMSCORE
20
15
10
5
TV
TV TV TV
+ Online + Print + Print
+ Online
Source: Dynamic Logic, Millward Brown
Beyond assessing view-throughs, it‖s important to determine
precisely what is a “conversion” based on campaign goals. In
the olden days of the early ‖00s, homepages or landing pages
were the only things tracked for conversion.
Now marketers are thinking about the path they want their
targets to take. Bruce Falck, head of the Google Content
Network, counsels clients to tag their sites appropriately and
“measure for a range of conversions including shallow
conversions where someone made it to a product page to a
full conversion which might be where someone downloads a
brochure. You can optimize the campaign off of any of these
types of conversions; it depends on what your objective is.”
A range of third-party tools that measure online impact of
inter- active advertising without clicks are available. They
include Google Campaign Insights, which shows how a
campaign has impacted search volume and website
Gian Fulgoni has been battling the “online doesn‖t work
for branding” challenge since he became chairman of
comScore in1999. As he says, “Scanner data is real.” When
scanner data became available in the early ‖80s, “it
immediately had an impact on ad spending. TV spending
froze, and $40 billion now flows into in-store promotion as a
result,” One of his key mandates is to link online data with
offline sales. AdEffx from comScore can assess offline
impact by linking with any shopper card data the client
chooses to use. In all, comScore has completed over 50
studies in the CPG space. [x+1], a demand-side platform,
offers a similar service called CPGconnect through a
partnership with IRI. Nielsen pioneered the technique
w i t h Consumer Direct, t h e result of a partnership with
Yahoo. The product is now available broadly through Nielsen.
One challenge with these kinds of studies is campaign
volume. If there is not enough volume for a campaign on a
per-site and
overall basis, you cannot find enough matches in the online
provider‖s panel to connect to the offline data source. To
date, Consumer Direct stu d i e s have been easiest to
implement u s i n g
large buys (30 million to 40 million impressions). A new
partnership established by Nielsen should make this easier, and
enable the results to get more granular. Nielsen now is in a
joint venture called Nielsen Catalina Solutions that, by fall
2010, will connect its data to the 50 million-plus householddata.
BEST PRACTICE: USE CURRENT GRP TOOLS,
AND SUPPORT INITIATIVES TO CREATE
BETTER ONES
The relatively simple way TV is planned and bought based on a
calculation of reach of a campaign tied into frequency of
exposure that translates into gross ratings points has been
discussed for more than a decade as one way to make online
more palatable to brand marketers. The challenge for online
includes the fact that the numerator is different). Online also
has a multiplicity of types of units and placement options that
complicate the equation when compared to a standard TV spot

CHART 18
Online ad impact tools show lift of visitation to an advertiser‖s site, post-exposure to the ad, but without a click. Impact over a month.
ADVERTISER SITE REACH
10%
65 %
Lift
CONTROL
TEST
53.8 %
Lift
49.1 %
Lift
45.7 %
Lift
5
0
Week of first exposure Weeks 1-2 after first exposure Weeks 1-3 after first exposure Weeks 1-4 after first exposure
Source: comScore
It is a “variable” nightmare. What is the relative value of a
search query or a search placement versus a :30? What is a
pre-roll video versus a :30 on TV with an entirely different ad
load? How about a rich-media interaction or a simple banner
impression?
Clearly, a lot of smart people are working in online. You
would think that the factors to assess various types of
online ads versus :30s on TV would have been developed by
now. But it‖s going to be expensive. Nonetheless, interest
about going this route is growing, with the Advertising
Research Foundation and Google joining forces and issuing
an RFP for an industry wide reach-and- frequency project to
various research vendors. RFP responses from research
vendors were due the week of Aug. 2, but as of this writing,
neither company was available for comment as to when the
project might get underway or when any results might be
made public. While the ultimate cross-media reach-andfrequency
tool is not available, concepts related to it are
being applied to online right now. Web reach and frequency
tools are primarily used in planning to assess delivery against
broad age/sex targets in metrics that are comparable to
offline media where marketers have historical perspective
in the relationships between reach and frequency delivery
and potential sales. comScore has tools that mimic offline
reach and frequency, as do Nielsen and Microsoft Atlas (see
chart 19).
BEST PRACTICE: PRE- AND POST-BUY STUDIES ENSURE
YOU GOT WHAT YOU PAID FOR
The industry h a s made progress connecting the dots
between what an agency planned for a campaign and what
was actually bought and delivered, one of the stickiest
problems in online media. Agencies typically use MRI or
@plan to determine likelihood of a target to consume
various types of media. This is then translated into
impression weights and buys are made accordingly. Given
that campaigns are bought based on impressions, and
those impressions and ad-server reports are blind to
demography, what do agencies get back? Not surprisingly,
impressions and click rates, plus view-throughs and
conversions if an online measure of impact is being used.
But if a brand marketer is truly buying with the idea of
reaching an audience, how can he prove he has gotten
anywhere near the desired target? Via comScore‖s AdEffx
Campaign Essentials and Nielsen‖s Campaign Audience
Effectiveness reports. Meanwhile, comScore has released
some results that show where both the advertiser and
publisher should be cautious in the buying and delivery
department; its findings may also point to areas where
assumptions made by audience targeting are flawed (see
chart 20).
What is the relative level of accuracy to be achieved? comScore is
in the process of compiling a normative database for AdEffx

CHART 19
Sample media plan from Atlas/comScore reach & frequency planning initiative
SITE COST CPM IMPRESSIONS TARGET REACH TARGET % FREQUENCY TRP CPP
Entertainment $120,000 $7.00 17,142,857 1,798,595 4.4% 6.1 27.0 $4,436
Shopping $120,000 $10.00 20,000,000 2,736,842 6.7% 3.8 25.6 $7,800
News $140,000 $5.50 25,454,545 1,134,387 2.8% 9.2 25.7 $5,441
Arts/Crafts $40,000 $2.75 14,545,455 1,975,986 4.9% 5.3 25.8 $1,549
CAMPAIGN $500,000 $6.48 77,142,857 6,116,648 15.5% 7.8 117.6 $4,251
RFP FROM AN AGENCY: “I have a budget of
$500,000 and want to maximize reach to
women 18-49 at an average frequency of 8
and I won’t exceed a $10 CPM.”
WHICH PERCENT OF MY TARGET
DID I REACH WITH THIS PLAN?
Campaign Essentials. “We can say with certainty that no
campaign is achieving 100% accuracy across the board,” said
Andrea Vollman, a comScore spokeswoman. “The industry as
a whole is starting to realize this, and so the new question
then becomes: So, if it‖s not possible to reach 100% with
audience targeting, how much of my target audience am I
actually reaching? And given that knowledge, is this really
the most efficient approach for my given media buy?”
According to Vollman, “These sorts of tests are showing that
paying more for audience targeting will be the most efficient
option for some buys. But in other cases, an advertiser may
find that context-based targeting delivers a strong enough
reach and at a better price, making it the better option.”
BEST PRACTICE: TEST FOR OPTIMAL FREQUENCY TO
BRAND IMPACT
What is the optimal frequency of exposure to an ad? In TV, an
adage that dates to a study in the ‖60s pegged it at three. With
so many different formats and ways to measure online ads,
optimal frequency is still an unanswered question. (While
frequency of an exposure to a unique can be pre-determined
by frequency capping in the ad server, the counts can be off due
to cookie deletion. That means ad-server data often overstates
reach and under-states frequency actually delivered.)
For frequency to click, DoubleClick data often shows that one
exposure is optimal. But given that cost-per-acquisition
inventory is so cheap, direct-response advertisers tended not to
care so much about frequency except in terms of creative
burnout. Insight Express has now produced a report from its
normative database about optimal frequency for branding
impact metrics.
Though even one exposure causes lift in unaided recall
(see chart 21), a point of diminishing returns is seen at
seven exposures, especially for purchase intent. What is
even more dramatic is its comparison of the brand impact
by frequency of standard online ads with video. Its data
supports IAG findings, pointing to a frequency of one being
optimal for online video ads.
BEST PRACTICE: EMPLOY BRAND-PROTECTION TOOLS
FOR CONTEXT SAFETY AND DELIVERY ASSURANCE
“29% of traffic was served to sites featuring user
generated content, 27% of which was deemed
inappropriate for brand advertisers.”
–ADSAFE 2009 YEAR-END REPORT
One of the more important layers of data that can be added
to any online buy is the brand-protection tool. Brand
marketers are now using tools like AdSafe, DoubleVerify and
AdXPose. A recent, much-passed-around “misplacement”
was an ESPN article about Lance Armstrong and the doping
scandal with two adjacent “Live Strong” ads. One of the agency
executives interviewed had to do damage control when a
U.S. Army ad appeared on a Pakistani website. According to
GroupM‖s John Montgomery, it‖s more than porn and
unfortunate adjacencies that should worry marketers. He
uses the services to also test latency (was the ad slow to
load?) In addition to waste, an even more serious problem: “If
you‖re a pharma company, many are forbidden to market
their products outside their c o u n t r y and they can get
into trouble. Montgomery did a test of six services, and as of
March began using the services of two of them.
The cost is about the same as ad serving: straight verification is a
5-cent to 6-cent CPM and full reporting costs about 10 cents
per CPM. Why not just included this technology into the ad
server rather than having to deal with an entirely separate
company and tagging process? I would not trust the ad server to
do it, nor would I trust the publishers.

CHART 20 Example of comScore pre/post testing: Campaign delivery can miss targeted audiences. Target
for this health and well-being product was females ages 35-54
MEN
% COMPOSITION OF EXPOSED AUDIENCE AGE BREAKDOWN
Only 43% of females exposed to
the campaign met the targeted age group
40%
60%
FEMALE
20.6%
22.4%
14 % 25.3%
17.3%
15-24
55+
25-34
35-44
45-54
Source: comScore AdEffx
BEST PRACTICE: WAS THE AD EVEN SEEN? ABOVE-THE-
FOLD TOOLS
Advertisers always care about where their ads are placed, for
optimal opportunity to view. For TV, it‖s typically the first ad
in the break. For magazines, it‖s front of the book or adjacent
to specific content. Online has the added dimension of
“above or below the fold.” A crucial determinate, as ads
below the fold, or below the standard height that will fit on
a computer monitor, are less likely to be seen. The challenge
is that we do not know whether they are seen at all or to
what degree, or what percentage of them is seen. In the
early days of the internet, most sites slapped as many ads as
possible on a page. Those at the bottom generated an
impression, but typically had lower click rates, or non-click
impact.
High-quality sites typically do not use this position anymore,
but if ads are being purchased through networks and
exchanges, who knows? Both comScore (September 2010)
and Google (March2010) have come to the rescue with
“above the fold” tools that use algorithms to detect
placements on the computer screen.
BEST PRACTICE: REMARKETING CONSUMERS
This is one of the most powerful uses of data online and
something that can set online apart from other broadbased
media. Cookie data can be used to target consumers
who have shown some prior interest in a product. Let‖s say
that a person filled out a form to get more information on
a particular vehicle model. That user can be identified at a
later time and retargeted with ads and offers for that car.
Agency execs noted how well it works. The technique was
originally called Boomerang when DoubleClick introduced it
back in the ―90s, but at that point the pool of data was not
large enough to find appropriate matches, and inventory
was so cheap, that it was not cost effective. Google /
DoubleClick opened up remarketing to all advertisers in
March 2010. Advertisers such as Infiniti, InterContinental
Hotels Group, Giorgio Armani and Samsung have used
their remarketing s e r vic es . In a study conducted by
comScore and ValueClick, retargeting was the most effective
targeting t e c h n i q u e at d r i v i n g s e a r c h q u e r i e s ,
generating over 1000% lift. It was twice as effective as
audience targeting.
BEST PRACTICE: INCORPORATE
INTERACTIVE INTO MEDIA-MIX MODELS
WHENEVER POSSIBLE
Media-mix modeling sometimes get a bad rap for being too
complex, expensive or too historical to be of much use in the
interactive world, which doesn‖t have years of data to
employ. Another challenge is just having enough data in
interactive that it can be read against the heavier media
weights of TV and print.
Marketers need to start looking at interactive on a level playing
field with other media. Their fear was that if they spent 3% of
total on interactive, the model might come back and tell them to
increase it to 15%. That‖s not going to happen. They just need to
take baby steps.

CREATIVE
“By far, the most important thing for driving success is
the quality of the ad, followed by aiming at an
audience.” –KEN MALLON, VP, YAHOO AD LABS
In TV, creative has four times the weight of media
according to ARS, one of the leading creative-focused
research companies. If that is the case, what is the impact of
creative on online advertising? It is a field surprisingly
l acking in attention in the online world. Most online
creative is produced and run with no insight into its appeal
among the target audience.
Why? When you consider that production costs for TV
commercials are often in excess of $1 million, you can see the
necessity. In online, if a buy was $200,000 and the creative cost
$40,000, it wasn‖t worth the effort.
For campaigns that have a threshold of about 10 million
online impressions, Nielsen finds those consumers in its
panel who have been exposed (minimum of about 250
people) and determines metrics like like-ability, purchase
intent and persuasion. It has tested about 2,000 online ads
over the last 1.5 years.
ComScore bought ARS, a company with 39 years in the TV
business, in early 2010 and is applying its tools and
techniques to the online world. ARS does pre-testing of
creative and can also link ad-persuasion metrics to any sales
data provided by the client. It looks at changes in market
share before and after various GRPs are achieved and links
back to various creative executions. The cost for doing such
studies online? $10,000 to $30,000, depending on the level
of granularity of the sample surveyed. What changes has it
observed in the market? Package-goods marketers are
starting to draw digital expertise in-house and are using
some of the same techniques used in TV with online creative.
DYNAMIC LOGIC‟S CREATIVE BEST PRACTICES FOR BRAND MARKETERS
DynamicLogic‟sanalysisofbest-andworst-performingcreativeexecutionsinitssystemnotesjusthowsignificantbadcreativecanbeatlowering
brand impact (chart 22).Herearethehighlightsofwhatitsassessmentasksmarketers,creativeteamsandpublisherstokeepinmind:
■ The brand has to be featured prominently
in all frames of the creative: in the ultimate
ADD medium, we‟re talking about keeping
the logo persistent. What if the consumer
just sees one frame of the ad?
■ For consumer package goods with a brand
extension, make sure the new product logo is
not overshadowed by the parent company.
■ In automotive, strong presence of the
vehicle name is needed, and its association
to the parent brand.
■ Each frame of an ad should stand on its
own in order to produce brand awareness;
communicate message/benefits/
differentiation; communicate brand
likeability/reason to purchase or call to
action, depending on advertising goal.
■ Reveal formats—the teaser sort of ads that
were very common in the early days of the
internet—don‟t work in any ad category
■ Don‟t make people work to get there
NOT EFFECTIVE
Ads that surround content may not work for
branding.
■ Viewers should never have to interact
with the ad to see the brand or
messaging.
■ If the goal is persuasion, avoid highly
obtrusive ad formats. Be considerate of the
visitor‟s mindset and the site content;
intrusive formats may work within certain
site categories (i.e., online video marketing
for theatrical releases on entertainment
sites) but appear annoying on others (the
same ads on news/information sites).
■ Online creative concepts that relate to
offline reap the benefits of media synergy.
■ Use ads that do not frame site content.
According to Dynamic Logic‟s Bill Havlena,
ads that are placed in the middle of content
tend to get most notice. Here‟s an instance
where the best practice is clearly not
observed as skyscrapers and leaderboards,
and still running rampant, as illustrated by
the CNN screen left.
■ When examining the top branding-related
product categories, such as consumer
package goods and pharmaceutical,
inclusion of coupons/free trial offers did not
differentiate performance on purchase
intent. What did move the needle was a
charity/donation message, which scored well
on ad awareness/persuasion.
Note: the creative findings cited have been echoed by reports issued by
Nielsen—especially about banners within rather than surrounding content—and
Insight Express, especially about the significance of brand presence and about
how “reveal ads” rarely work from a branding perspective.

CHART 21
40%
39
38
37
36
35
CHART 22
Best practices in frequency. Purchase
intent peaks after 7-10 exposures
SEVEN
The point of
no return
ctrl 1 Exp 2 Exp 3-4 Exp 5-6 Exp 7-10 Exp 11+ Exp
Poorly performing campaigns can have a negative impact on
branding
ONLINE TOP 20%
15% IMPACTED DELTA
10
5
0
ONLINE
BOTTOM
20%
Source: Insight Express
ONLINE TOP 20%
ONLINE AVERAGE 60%
ONLINE BOTTOM 20%
The company is in the midst of developing a roll-up of best
practices from the tests it has done. One key finding: for
online creative, the product must be an element of the story.
To be effective, you have to simply communicate the message
and link to the brand.
KEY INSIGHTS ACCORDING TO DAVID
KAPLAN, SENIOR VP, NIELSEN IAG
PRODUCT LEADERSHIP
■ For video ads, the viewing experience is so fundamentally
different (and memorable) that a frequency of one is
probably most effective.
■ Premium online video ads yield deeper engagement than
corresponding TV ads on the basis of branding metrics they
define premium as full-length p r o g r a m m i n g . Video shorts
perform about as well as display ads.
■ Repurposed TV ads can work better than originally produced
Web ads during premium video, perhaps because TV ads are
more likely to have been pre-tested or have higher production
values.
BEST PRACTICE: DON‖T OPTIMIZE
CREATIVE TO THE CLICK
When the digital world talks about creative optimization, it
typically means optimization to the click or the online
conversion. Ad servers have automated tools where the
highest-clicking creative goes into rotation most and separate
companies like Teracent and Tumri perform similar functions.
Researcher Rex Briggs offers an example of why this may not
yield the audience desired. The creative for a Warner Brothers
movie when released on DVD was optimized by clicks. A very
complex movie, those who clicked tended to be familiar with the
movie already and predisposed to purchase it. This left out all
of those who had not seen the movie or were entirely
unfamiliar with it.
“By optimizing to the click, they only got the lower-funnel
consumers,” said Briggs.
For its next campaign, it measured with a brand-impact
survey and optimized accordingly so that the studio reached
the goal of drawing a new audience to the movie.
NEW CREATIVE OPTIONS
What is the best ad or most effective ad unit in online? Unlike
TV or print, where this discussion hasn‖t happened for years, it
rages in regard to online. Richy Glassberg, led the IAB‖s
first initiative to standardize creative units and the follow up
that introduced the skyscraper and the leaderboard, now has
different thoughts about ad creative and paths not taken.
“You can‖t get a branding message in a standard unit,”
MedHelp.org, an online health community. “There‖s a reason
why in online there is search and everything else,” he said.

EYE WONDER RICH MEDIA UNIT
The above ad tied into wrestling content on the WWE site.
SHORTTAIL MEDIA
Cisco interstitial video on NYTimes.com.
DOUBLECLICK
Rich media ads pull relevant content from
YouTube.
Stacey Deziel of MEC is a big fan of video for branding, as “it‖s the
entry point or experience that draws people into a brand.” She
also see online as providing “greater depth to tell a story,” as
the latest forms of rich media enable consumers to go into
layers of information like retail locators without having to leave
the content environment.
Is bigger better? Is it disruptive? Should an ad flash? Research
reviewed for this paper from comScore, IAG, ARS, Dynamic Logic,
Insight Express and Nielsen shows that video is probably the
most effective format, but video doesn‖t make sense everywhere
online. Online can never seem to get enough of the new and
novel. While TV has its simple :30, online doesn‖t have one killer
format that appeals to brand marketers. At the annual IAB
Mixx conference Sept. 27, a competition was announced for new
creative units, and winning submissions will earn a place in the
IAB standardized fold. According to the IAB, 80% of all units in
the market are standard format. The new units have to appeal
from a user experience, work well across an array of sites and
give room for brand marketers to tell a story. Finalists will be
chosen by the end of 2010, and after testing in market,
winners will be made standard by the end of 2011.
Given that online does allow for so much “palette expansion,”
here are some creative types noted by those interviewed:
■ The interstitial video
David Payne, founder of ShortTail Media, formerly an ad
network and now a video-ad platform, also favors video
formats. After a couple of years of fruitlessly “selling the value
of context to agencies,” he about-faced his company to focus
on “the only really good inventory out there to provide value
on a brand basis: video.” As a user on a top publisher site calls up
a specific page of content (for example, a reader on the site of
The New York Times, looking for Tom Friedman‖s column), the
screen is grayed out and a full-screen video appears in front of
the article. “It‖s completely about the video,” Payne said. And
better yet, “the ads are just repurposed from TV, so no creative
cost. It‖s a scalable way to run TV creative online.”
Sites such as NYTimes.com, Travel & Leisure, Weather.com,
Marketwatch, Reuters and EW.com typically use video ads to
monetize specific content areas, he said. How do the publishers
prevent these full-screen ads from annoying consumers?
“Publishers frequency cap, and some do them only upon first
view,” said Payne. He notes that 30% to 50% of people watch
the entire ad as the value exchange of desired content for an ad
view is reinforced. The price charged is similar to that for pre-roll
video.
■ Me!Box
MEC‖s Deziel favors these ads as they are “looking at video in a
non-linear way.” Mike Emerson, Me!Box‖s head of sales, said
brand marketers are using it to “make video more
quantifiable— to engage, pull consumers in on what is most
interesting.” Me!Box layers interactivity on top of any video so
that the user can get related information without leaving the
video player. It can link to professional content or usergenerated
content. “You take existing assets and put bookends,
add inserts, utility and interactivity with one unit,” explained
Emerson. Major brand creative executions launch this fall.
■ eyeWonder
Launched in 1999, this early leader in the rich-media space has
continued to innovate. It works with the unique capabilities
of online and develops units that are playful and often relate to
the content where they are placed. A Red Bull sponsorship of
an air show initiates out of a newsy looking banner on a
newspaper homepage and then literally explodes through the
content. A Slim Jim creative execution on the WWE site enables
the user to feed a wrestler a Slim Jim. When fed, the wrestler
initiates a microsite that offers various branded games.
While executions like this would not work for all brands, they
clearly appeal to the target audience for these products and
make a powerful connection with the content in which they
are placed. An elegant execution for InterContinental Hotels
& Resorts is an exercise in contrast: a rotating cube enables
the user to get more information on proper- ties in specific cities.
■ Google/DoubleClick Rich Media
Google and DoubleClick are focusing on dynamic ad creation
that pulls in assets from key properties like YouTube. The ad
unit, produced for Ford, dynamically changes with the site
content. If the user was reading about technology, greenrelated
t o p i c s or about hybrids, the ad automatically brings
in the most relevant videos or articles on these topics from
the Ford site or YouTube Ford channel.

CONCLUSION
Interactive has had only 15 years to develop, and for most
of that time, marketers have been trying to fit it into the
containers of the past. Is online a mass medium? Is it a
targeting play? The power of interactive is about the
intersection of the two.
Too much s e p a r a t i o n h a s always existed between
S i l i c o n Valley and Madison Avenue. One believes in the
power of technology and the other in the power of words and
images. There‖s a positive sort of exchange program going on
now. As technology companies continue to enter the media
space, they will likely bring the process, and the speed in
which they excel, with them. Their own products become
further commoditized, technology companies are embracing
the religion of marketing. At the same time, interactive
practices and automation t e c h n i q u e s are creating new
expectations about the operations and capabilities of “old”
media. The future of television may lie in the data locked
within set-top boxes. It will likely take years to get to the point
of ad serving for television and dynamically generated
advertising that addresses specific households, but that day will
come.
On a more micro level, those in “new media” are migrating to
“old” rather than the other way around. Rex Briggs, eponymous
online researcher, has joined forces with Telmar, one of the
leading modelers of data for television, to bring a cross-media
tool to the market. Gerard Broussard, former senior partner and
director of media analytics at WPP‖s mOne/MindShare, now
serves as VP-research and analytics at Canoe, the consortium
that is working to make television addressable. Dave Morgan,
the father of behavioral targeting, is now applying these
concepts to optimizing television ads through his startup
Simulmedia. Breaking down barriers between disciplines is a step
in the right direction.
In the day-to-day j o b s of most marketers, we have become
overrun with the minutia and lost something of the excitement
of change that fueled the last two decades. Interactive
advertising took the concept of “TMI” to a whole new level.
Among so many of those interviewed for this ebook, there is
world-weariness, especially among those who‖ve endured
boom after bust, billing discrepancies , and endless
streams of data with l i t t l e insight. We came in with
dreams, but we‖re run with spreadsheets.”
Current trends in interactive, an overemphasis on data at the
expense of creative, has led to a misunderstanding of what media
are, and can be. We now have two-way communication
between people and companies, and new ways to build trust
and sell products better tailored to consumer needs, and that
can support free media. But the core of that has to be great
products and powerful messages about them. We‖re supposed
be an industry based on imagination, but we‖re lacking in it. The
Renaissance brought about the invention of perspective in
paintings. We now have an amazing palette. Aligning with
people through real marketing, we‖re going to get there.
Who does this kind of marketing today? Apple, Google and Nike. A
company like Nike is a religion built around sports. People want
godlike power, and they will reward companies who give it to
them. We want to control time and space, not just media
messages.
Google and Apple have made significant investment in the brandadvertising
business and that is a positive sign. Why did Apple
develop the iAd and Google make a commitment to display
advertising? Diversify revenues? No. They have imagination.
FINDING THE MAGIC
This technologically and data-driven media world, there‖s
still a place for storytelling and connecting values with
products and services. “Magic” is a word once most
commonly associated with entertainment colossus Disney.
It has been resurrected and co-opted by Apple‖s Steve Jobs.
First with the iPhone, then the iPad, Jobs brought excitement
to a world weary from economic pressures and
overwhelmed with information. Tablets are merely smaller
computers with touchscreens, they are magical, even
transforming.